UKPylot’s MINI Blog

We all want to get to work quickly, safely, and enjoyably. After several years now of driving on San Diego’s freeways for the morning commute, here some tips I’ve come up with based on my daily observations.

1. When merging into evenly-spaced traffic, slow down to 40mph. This makes it safer for everyone – the cars on the freeway who have to brake to let you out, and everyone behind you who is now worried about how they are going to get out of the on-ramp at such a slow speed.
2. When merging into tightly-spaced traffic, accelerate quickly past any space that someone opens up for you. Only the very last 10 feet of the ramp is actually available for merging. It doesn’t matter that you will have to make someone brake hard to let you out. They should have been making a space for you anyway, the rude monkeys!
3. When merging into light traffic, be sure to merge in the first 5 feet of the ramp. The dashed white lines between you and the freeway indicates the “bad driver” zone, only bad drivers need that much space to accelerate and move smoothly out.
4. If it’s 6am in the morning and pitch black outside, you must be wearing sun glasses so that everyone knows you are a prick. The exemption to this rule is if you are driving a BMW, we already know you are a prick.

Following these rules will make your’s, and my, life on the road much easier. Note though that these are more advanced rules, I am already assuming that you are talking on your cell phone, changing lanes without notice or space to do so, blocking people from pulling out etc. If you aren’t already doing those then I suggest you master them before moving on to the 4 steps above.

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At the Imperial Valley Fair this weekend I took this picture of the Q96 MINI parked in the car park:

The Fair was pretty good, lots of exhibits and animals being shown and auctioned (later in the week). If you want to see some more pictures of all the sights, click right here.

All three of the vehicles I have owned since living in the US (my first vehicle was leased) have/had vanity plates. One of the reasons for this is that such things aren’t readily available back in the UK. Yes, you can buy them but you can’t usually choose them and then you’ll end up paying $1000 for PAUL4999, hardly a bargain.

This week’s San DIego Reader has a long article about vanity plates, mostly about ones they have seen on the road and talking to the people who chose them. The article opens with some statistics such as CA is the 22nd ‘most vain’ state with 3.49 percent of vehicles having a vanity plate: VA has the most at 16.2 percent. It then makes the following statement:

I wonder what the percentage is just for MINIs in the country? I think it must be quite high, but I don’t agree with the statement in the article. I think it is much more to do with the culture of the MINI community that we take pride in our vehicles – don’t see many vanity plates on the Prius.

Yep, last night on the way home I passed the 75k mile mark. Usually I notice when I hit the ’000 boundaries but this time I missed it, saw 750001 instead. Carrie is still going strong though at the weekend I went to get gas and the DSC light came on and wouldn’t go off. I figured I would troubleshoot it when I got to the gas station but when I cranked her up the light was off and has stayed off ever since.

The front brakes are due to be replaced in the next 2000 miles or so. After Brian’s comment about how much I paid for the rear ones, I am not sure if I will take it back to the last garage or not. One thing I noticed though with the rears is that they replaced the rotors as well – shouldn’t I be able to get just the front pads changed??

Ever since gas was real expensive I’ve been doing my own hypermiling variant which involves taking the car out of gear and coasting when it makes sense to do so.

At the dentist recently I was reading a car magazine that talked about ‘fuel efficiency myths’ and it said that fuel injected cars do no better coasting than they do with your foot off the pedal, so keep the car in gear in case you need some revs. There is no gas saving.

I’m no car expert but I can see the rev counter at 3k rpm compared to 0 and it seems to me that means gas is being used, although it might be small.

What do you all think?

Took my Dad up to Joshua Tree last week, had a good day wandering about. Thought I’d share this picture I took.

You can click on the image to see a few more pictures of the Park.